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moral quotes

  • The flute is not an instrument that has a good moral effectit is too exciting.

    -Aristotle
    c.330  BC  Politics.

  • Wordsworth says somewhere that wherever Virgil seems to have composed 'with his eye on the object', Dryden fails to render him. Homer invariably composes 'with his eye onthe object', whether the object be moral or a material one: Pope composes with his eye on his style, into which he translates his object, whatever it is.

    - Matthew Arnold
    On Translating Homer, lecture1.

  •   Sentences which simply express moral judgements do not say anything. Theyare pure expressions of feeling and as such donot come under the categoryof truth and falsehood.

    - SirAlfred Jules Ayer
      Language, Truth and Logic, ch.6.

  • Notale everhappened intheway wetell it.Butthemoral is always correct.

    - Donald Barthelme
      The Dead Father, ch.6.

  • All reform except a moral one will prove unavailing.

    -Thomas Carlyle
      Critical and Miscellaneous Essays,'Corn Law Rhymes'.

  • Everything's got a moral, if only you can find it.

    -Dodgson
      The Duchess.  Alice's  Adventures in Wonderland, ch.9,'The Mock Turtle's Story'.

  • The Victorians expected every building, like every painting, to tell a story, and preferably to point to a moral as well. 199

    - Sir Hugh Maxwell Casson
      An Introduction to Victorian  Architecture.

  • There isno suchthing as a moral dress† It's people who are moral or immoral.

    -Jeanette ne  e Jeanette Jerome Churchill
      'That Moral Dress', in the Daily Chronicle,16 Feb.

  • Some kind of moral discovery should be the object of every tale.

    - Sir William Neil pseudonym Cassandra Connor
    Under Western Eyes, prologue.

  • I don't have a moral plan. I'm a Canadian.

    - David Cronenberg
    Quoted in Leslie Halliwell Halliwell's Filmgoer's and Video Viewer's Companion (9th edn,1988).

  • When physics, chemistry, biology, medicine, contribute to the detection of concrete human woes and to the development of plans for remedying them and relieving the human estate, they become moral; they become part of the apparatus of moral inquiry or science† When the consciousness of science is fully impregnated with the consciousness of human value, the greatest dualism which now weighs humanity down, the split between the material, the mechanical and the scientific and the moral and ideal will be destroyed.

    -John Dewey
      Reconstruction in Philosophy.

  • The function of criticism is the reeducation of perception of works of art† The conception that its business is to appraise, to judge in the legal and moral sense, arrests the perception of those who are influenced by the criticism that assumes this task.

    -John Dewey
      Art as Experience.

  • His moral character†was full of promise, but of no performance.

    - CharlesJohn Huffam Dickens
    ^4  Of Mr Pecksniff. Martin Chuzzlewit, ch.5.

  • Let us be moral.Let us contemplate existence.

    - CharlesJohn Huffam Dickens
    ^4  Mr Pecksniff. Martin Chuzzlewit, ch.9.

  • That it is at least as difficult to staya moral infection as a physical one; that such a disease will spread with the malignityand rapidity of the Plague; that the contagion, when it has once made head, will spare no pursuit or condition, but will lay hold on people in the soundest health, and become developed inthe most unlikely constitutions; is a fact as firmlyestablished by experience as that we human creatures breathe an atmosphere.

    - CharlesJohn Huffam Dickens
    ^7  Little Dorrit, bk.2, ch.13.

  • The economic services that it can render are picayune compared to the moral effect that it produces, and its true function is to create in two or more persons a feeling of solidarity.

    - EŁ  mile Durkheim
      Of labour. The Division of Labor in Society (translated by George Simpson,1933).

  • All books are the Book of Job, high moral tests and tasks set in fairy tales, landmined and unforgiving as golf greens, as steeplechase and gameboard and obstacle course. 310

    - Stanley Lawrence Elkin
      'The Future of the Novel', in the NewYork Times,17 Feb.

  • Since his capacity to do is forced into channels of evil through environment and pressures, man is strong before he is moral. The world's anguish is caused by people between twentyand forty.

    -William Harrison Faulkner
      Interview in Paris Review, Spring.

  • A woman can look both moral and excitingif she also looks as if it was quite a struggle.

    - Edna Ferber
      In Reader's Digest, Dec.

  • Humanbeings, intheirgenerous endeavour to construct a hypothesis that shall not degrade a First Cause, have always hesitated to conceive a dominant power of a lower moral quality than their own.

    -Thomas Hardy
      The Return of the Native, bk.6, ch.1.

  • The worst thing is that we live in a contaminated moral environment.We fell morally ill because we became used to saying something different from what we thought.

    -Va  clav Havel
      Speech,1  Jan.

  • The Frenchhad a moremartial air thanthe English.There seemed to be a species of military instinct in all classes. No young man appeared to have finished his education till after a bloody campaign† They were at this singular period, without the least exaggeration, a century behind us in notions of legal and moral responsibility.

    - Benjamin Robert Haydon
    Autobiography (published1847).

  •    About morals,I know only that what ismoral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.

    - Ernest Millar Hemingway
      Death in the Afternoon, ch.1.

  • The quality of moral behaviour varies in inverse ratio to the number of human beings involved.

    - Aldous Leonard Huxley
    Grey Eminence, ch.10.

  • The medium's gaze is brief, intense, and promiscuous. The shelf life of the moral causes it makes its own is brutally short.

    - Michael Ignatieff
      'Is Nothing Sacred?  The Ethics of  Television', in Daedalus: Journal of the American  Academy of  Arts and Sciences, Fall.

  • Zwei Dinge erfu«  llen das Gemu« t  mit immer neuer und zunehmender Bewunderung und Ehrfurcht, je  o« fter und anhaltender sich das Nachdenken damit besch a« ftigt: der bestirnte Himmel u«  ber mir, unddas moralische Gesetz in mir. Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the oftener and more steadily we reflect on them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within.

    - Immanuel Kant
      Kritik der praktischen Vernunft (Critique of Practical Reason) (translated by T K  Abbott).

  • The League of Nations grows in moral courage. Its frown will soon be more dreaded than a nation's arms, and when that happens, you and I shall have securityand peace.

    - (James) Ramsay Macdonald
      Speech, London, 9 Nov.

  • There is a growing division in our comparatively prosperous society between the South and the North and Midlands, which are ailing, that cannot be allowed to continue. There is a general sense of tension. The old English way might be to quarrel and have battles, but they were friendly. I can only describe as wicked the hatred that has been introduced, and which is to be found among different types of people today. Not merelyan intellectual but a moral effort isrequired toget rid of it.

    -Stockton
      Maiden speech as the Earl of Stockton (60 years after first entering the House of Commons), House of Lords,13 Nov.

  • The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people.

    - Norman Kingsley Mailer
      'Hip, Hell, and The Navigator', in Western Review, no.23, Winter.

  • All the immediate checks to populationseem to be resolvable into moral restraint, vice and misery.

    -Thomas Robert Malthus
      An Essay on the Principle of Population.

  • We sing the love of danger.Courage, rashness, and rebellion are the elements of our poetry. Hitherto literature has tended to exalt thoughtful immobility, ecstasy, and sleep, whereas we are for aggressive movement, febrile insomnia, mortal leaps, and blows with the fist.We proclaim that the world is richer for a new beautyof speed, and our praise isfor themanat the wheel. There is no beauty now save in struggle, no masterpiece can be anything but aggressive, and hence we glorify war, militarism and patriotism.

    - Emilio FilippoTomasso Marinetti
      Manifesto of Futurism. Quoted in Denis Mack Smith Italy:  A Modern History (1959), p.270.

  • The government and the people are under a moral necessity of acting together; a free press compels them to bend to one another.

    -James Mill
      In the Edinburgh Review, May^ Aug.

  • A stationary condition of capital and population implies no stationary state of human improvement. There could be as much scope as ever for all kinds of mental culture, and moral and social progress.

    -John Stuart Mill
     Principles of Political Economy, with Some Applications to Social Philosophy.

  • Why have women Passion, intellect, moral activitythese threeand a place in society where no one of the three can be exercised?

    - Florence Nightingale
      'Cassandra' pt.1, part of an unpublished work  Suggestions for Thought to Searchers after Religious Truth (revised and privately printed1859). Published as an appendix in Ray Strachey The Cause:  A Short History of the Women's Movement in Great Britain (1928).

  • There was a time when the average reader read a novel simply for the moral he could get out of it, and however na|«ve that may have been, it was a good deal less na|«ve than some of the limited objectives he has now.

    - (Mary) Flannery O'Connor
      'Some  Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction'. Paper read at  Wesleyan College, Fall.

  • A story with a moral appended is like the bite of a mosquito. It bores you, and then injects a stinging drop to irritate your conscience.

    -O Henry pseudonym of  William Sydney Porter
      Strictly Business,'The Gold That Glittered'.

  • When a man takes a farm from which another has been evicted, you must show him on the roadside when you meet him; you must show him in the streets of the town; you must show him in the fair and the market place; and even in the house of worship, by leaving him severely aloneby putting him into a moral Coventry, by isolating himfromhiskindasif hewerea leperofold.You must show himyourdetestationofthe crimesthat hehas committed.

    - Charles Stewart Parnell
      Speech that established the practice of boycotting, Ennis, 19 Sep.

  • Asthe strong man exults in his physical ability, delighting in such exercises as call his muscles into action, so glories the analyst in that moral activity which disentangles.

    - EdgarAllan Poe
      Of detective work.'The Murders in the Rue Morgue', in the Gentleman's Magazine, Apr.

  • Who now reads Cowley? if he pleases yet, His moral pleases, not his pointed wit.

    - Alexander Pope
      Imitations of Horace, bk.2, epistle1, l.75^6.

  • On devient moral de'  s qu'on est malheureux. We become moral once we are miserable.

    - Marcel Proust
      A la recherche du temps perdu,'A l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs'.

  •    The threat to morale comes not from the orientation of a few, but from the closed minds of the many.

    - Charles S(pittal) Robb
      On gays in the military. In the NewYorkTimes, 5 Feb.

  • The moral of all this†is that we have the kind of advertising we deserve.

    - Dorothy L(eigh) Sayers
      'The Psychology of Advertising', in The Spectator,19 Nov.

  • A man of great common sense and good taste, meaning thereby a man without originality or moral courage.

    - George Bernard Shaw
     Of Caesar. Caesar and Cleopatra, notes.

  • An Englishman thinks he is moral when he is only uncomfortable.

    - George Bernard Shaw
      The Devil. Man and Superman, act 3.

  • But from the first 'twas Peter's drift To be a kind of moral eunuch, He touched the hem of Nature's shift, Felt faintand never dared uplift The closest, all-concealing tunic.

    - Percy Bysshe Shelley
      'Peter Bell theThird', pt.4, stanza11.

  • The great instrument of moral good is the imagination; and poetryadministers to the effect byacting on the cause.

    - Percy Bysshe Shelley
    A Defence of Poetry.

  • In our country the lie has become not just a moral category but a pillar of the State.

    - Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn
      Quoted in the Observer, 29 Dec.

  • No one can be perfectly free until all are free; no one can be perfectly moral till all are moral; no one can be perfectly happy till all are happy.

    - Herbert Spencer
    Social Statics, pt.4, ch.30, section16.

  • You are so afraid of losing your moral sense that you are not willing to take it through anything more dangerous than a mud-puddle.

    - Gertrude Stein
      'Q.E.D.', bk.1. Collected in Fernhurst, Q.E.D., and Other Early Writings (1971).

  • In marriage, a man becomes slack and selfish, and undergoes a fatty degeneration of his moral being.

    - Robert Louis Stevenson
    Virginibus Puerisque,'Virginibus Puerisque', pt.1.

  • We want a society in which we are free to make choices, to make mistakes, to be generous and compassionate. That is what we mean by a moral societynot a society in which the State is responsible for everything, and no one is responsible for the State.

    - Margaret HildaThatcher, Baroness Thatcher
      Speech, Zurich University,14 Mar.

  • He was the type of man who was always trying to live beyond his moral means.

    - (Theodore) Philip Toynbee
      Of J Middleton Murry. In the Observer,12 Jan.

  • Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.

    - Mark pseudonym of  Samuel Langhorne Clemens Twain
      TheAdventures of Huckleberry Finn,'Notice'.

  • I suffer the anthropological malady diagnosed by Le  vi- Strauss inTristes tropiques: I find it much more difficult to suspend value judgments about the society in which I normally reside than I do abroad. It takes physical and cultural distance to gain moral detachment and political noncommitment. Relativism implies a solid measure of indifference.

    - Pierre L van den Berghe
    'From the Popocatepetl to the Limpopo', collected in Bennett Berger (ed) Authors of their Own Lives (1990).

  •    There are those who believe Black people possess the secret of joyand that it is this which will sustain them through any spiritual or moral or physical devastation.

    - Alice Malsenior Walker
      Possessing the Secret ofJoy, epigraph.

  • Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo.

    - H(erbert) G(eorge) Wells
      TheWife of Sir Isaac Harman, ch.9.

  •    The moral life of man forms part of the subject matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium.

    - Oscar Fingal O'FlahertieWills Wilde
    The Picture of Dorian Gray, preface.

  • There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written.

    - Oscar Fingal O'FlahertieWills Wilde
    The Picture of Dorian Gray, preface.

  • The Labour Party is a moral crusade, or it is nothing.

    - (James) Harold Wilson, Baron Wilson of Rievaulx
      Scottish Labour Party conference, 5 Sep.

Webster's New World Dictionary of Quotations Copyright © 2010 by Chambers Harrap Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved. Published by Wiley, Hoboken, NJ. Used by arrangement with John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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